I always had crushes, always. I can remember going to sleep, aged six, wondering, 'So should I marry Jimmy or Tommy?' My friends and I were boy-crazy. We thought a lot about kissing. I think a lot of romantic ideas, when I was growing up in New Jersey in the Sixties, were fed by movies. Until I discovered the books on my parents' shelves when I was 12. I can remember finding The Fountainhead, and sitting up when I read the part where a man bit a woman on the breast. I was like, 'Why on earth would anyone do that? Why would she let him?' But romantic ideas and sexual ideas were certainly very big in my life and they were in all of my friends' lives.

I remember very well how I felt as a young teenager. In my writing I'm focused on the time where everything is new and you don't quite get it. I connect with young people, there's no question, I can't explain that. We look at each other and I know what's on their minds. But even so, I wasn't the perfect parent that some kids think I must be. I get billions of letters from young people with problems. And the more troubled kids seem to be writing to me from the UK, usually girls. It's always been that way. I think girls are more willing to admit that they have problems.

From my father I learned everything that I know about men; that they can be nurturing, that they can be funny and kind and loving and smart. My mother wasn't the one who talked to us, my father was the one who talked to me about everything. He was the one I went to asking what happens to girls when they're 13, I was only eight at the time, but yes, he was the one who explained. By the time I was called into his room for the birds and bees discussion of course it was way too late. But he died so young, only 54. We never got to know each other as adults. He led me to believe I could be anything I wanted to be. Yet when I was very young I made the odd decision to go over to my mother's side and marry early and have babies. I still don't know why I did that. Maybe that's what we all did then...

I've had three husbands. The first one I married at 21. The next one was a very difficult relationship and it should have just been an affair. And now I'm with George, my best husband. We met when we had just turned 40, and we've been together 29 years. This morning I asked him what men want, and he said, 'Sex, sex, sex'. Women maybe want companionship a little more but I think a lot of men are spoilt by their mothers. I'm guilty of that myself, I have a son.

There's something wrong with every man. I tell that to my daughter all the time. I say, 'Look, if you want someone in your life, you have to make compromises'. I've hardly ever been single. I think some of that had to do with fear of being alone. You have to work to keep the passion going in a relationship, you have to work at the sex part. It can never be like when you were brand new again. I was reminiscing with my old secretary, and she said, 'When you first met you couldn't keep your hands off each other! Everything was about the two of you being together.' She was witnessing this, probably gagging.

I love men, apart from one: George Bush. I'm hoping that with the next presidential election that we will find ourselves in a better era, where sex is not a dirty subject, where puberty is a healthy subject, where we won't have so much book banning in America. I'm hoping, politically, that America is going to prove to the world that we're not all bad.